Chocolate Heart Mango

At last some new Mango.  My source on the Hawaiian island of Maui this year was a dud, but a customer of mine (thanks Dan) sourced out some great 26 year old Chocolate Heart Mango billets from the Big Island and stored at a cabinet shop in northern California.  Here’s the first build from that wood.

I have posted before that Mango is a variety wood–many colors, grain patterns, and visual appearances.  It was tough, even with these quarter sawn billets to get back and sides that matched well.  I’m calling this Chocolate Heart Mango because of the brown streaks and blushes in the wood.  In addition most of the sets that I have show fairly well-matched black spalt.  I’m into wood close-up pictures, so sink your teeth into these.  I used a thin strip of India Rosewood for the back strip and I left off side purfling because there was just so much activity in the grain that anything that I thought of using seemed to detract from the overall appearance.

 

The neck is African Black Limba.  This wood is stabile, light in weight and has colors and appearances that match up with  this Mango pretty well.   The accent wood is Oregon Black Walnut Burl.  The tuners are my standard Gotoh planetary geared 4:1 and the strings are GHS flourocarbon, low “G”.

I decided to spice things up a bit with some blue Paua Abalone purfling and sound hole rosette.  The binding is India Rosewood and the fret boad and bridge are a beautiful  brownish-striped Munn Ebony.  The age of all of these woods is well over 26 years and are air dried–super stabile and super good looking.  Tonally, these instruments favor mid-range and exhibit warmth with good volume and sustain.

That’s about it.  This instrument and a “Mini-Me”  Chocolate Heart Mango Concert ukulele were delivered to Hale Ukulele last week.  I’ll post the Mini-Me next.

Aloha Y’all